Puns

I thought I'd take a different tack this time, as I've been becoming increasingly unwilling to explain myself in English, I figure if I throw out something in Japanese, I have no choice but give some account of it.

All poetry for me is occasional, I rarely, if ever sit down with a prescribed idea to work through it and edit it until it shines. This is why so many of my recent sonnets have something of an unpolished feel: they're all off the top of my head. Even the "pet epic" I wrote as an undergrad was a surprisingly coherent mish-mash. Anyway, I was bored with Sappho and Catullus one day, so I penciled the following in one of my tiny notebooks:

神の苦に天の白花を見に行って
　霜の句がよめなくなると馬鹿

kami no ku ni ama no shirobana o mi ni itte
shimo no ku ga yomenaku naru to baka

it's so stupid that I see the white flower of heaven
in the gods' sorrow while failing to read the frost's verse.

Of course, it's not that simple. The two halves of this tanka turn on the paired phrases kami no ku and shimo no ku, "gods' sorrow" and "frost's verse" respectively. Those phrases are homophonous with the technical terms for the "upper verse" and "lower verse" of a traditional Japanese poem, due to the fact that the two halves of a tanka were generally written as a single vertical line. So, alternatively,

it's stupid that I watch the white flower of an upper verse
while failing to read the verse below.

The "upper verse" of a tanka is what was historically called a hokku, what we and our Japanese contemporaries would probably call a haiku. Part of the conceit of the poem is not only the failure of considering the divine absent its worldly counterpart but also the failure to see in a derived form, that so often is mistaken by we Anglo types as complete and perfect, its historical companion. Part of what authorized poets like Masaoka Shiki and the Americans who idolized him to say such superbly wacky things about the composition of haiku was the erasure of its historical condition as one of a pair in linked verses.

Which brings me to the verb yomu, inflected here as yomenaku ("unable to yomu"), which generally means to read, but often in the context of poetry means "to compose" or "to recite," because etymologically they share a common origin in an 8th century verb, also yomu, which meant to count aloud rhythmically in much the same way we as children recite the alphabet. What I mean to say with this cascade of odd puns, which I can only do prosaically, is "it's stupid to look for some kind of divine pathos in the seemingly lotus/haiku, all the while ignoring the rich tradition of suffering and sensation here on earth." It's not one over the other, just as the tanka contains both.